


virtue rewarded

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A 90’s Romcom About Georgian Era Aristocrats, A Beautiful English Country Estate, A Handsome Rake, Afternoon delight, Alternate Universe - 18th century, Alternate Universe - Georgian Era, Alternate Universe - Historical, An Actual Nice Girl, Aristocrat Ben, Business partners with benefits, Check Out My Works Cited Pages, Deception Plot, Enter Rey, F/M, Fake Dating, Fistfighter Rey, Flower Girl Rey, Fop Kylo Ren, Georgian Era, Historical AU, Kylo Has A Milkmaid Kink, Kylo Needs To Bring A Nice Girl Home To Secure His Fortune, London, Lots Of Vulgar Georgian Slang, Meeting the Parents, Mistaken Identity, Nefarious Kylo Ren Can Never Walk Away From a Wager, Pretending To Be a Bad Girl For Kylo’s Money, Rake Kylo, Rey Is a Woman of Honor and Will Fight You, Rey’s in an 18th Century Fight Club, Shakespearean “Country” Puns, Should There Be a Duel?, Smut, So He Attempts to Hire a Prostitute, So Many Rakes, The Author Has a Pastoral Kink, The Force Is a Series of Secret Tunnels, There Will Be A Glossary Of Terms Each Chapter, Think Hulu’s Harlots Not Jane Austen, Transactional Relationship, Tricking The Family Trope, Virginity Loss, inheritance drama, rogues - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2020-05-15 00:21:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: A perilous tale of mistaken identity, nefarious forces, and virtue rewarded.A vain wastrel of a Lord, Kylo Ren, returns home with a vengeance: and a desire to reclaim his inheritance from his dying father. The trouble is: he has no proof he has learned a thing since his respectable parents cut him off financially. However, if he were to acquire the right bride to prove he is in fact a changed man: he could redeem himself. He seeks the right woman to take part in the ruse: a skilled, cultured, utterly lovely harlot referenced in Harris’s List as “London’s Venus”....Rey is not London’s Venus, she is a kindhearted ragamuffin and 5th-best fist-fighter in the city (on a full stomach), who would be down-on-her-luck if she’d ever had any luck to begin with. All she needs is a few pennies to keep herself off the streets. She overhears two gentlemen on the search for the perfect courtesan to bring home to the Solo Estate, and the price they’re offering is no small sum. If she were to fit that description, she would have a place to spend the summer in comfort and safety and more than enough money for food if she and Lord Ren prove successful to his ailing father. If she can convince Lord Ren that the Venus is her…





	1. easy virtue

**Author's Note:**

> Um, before I get any “Darcy Kylo” squeeing: this is more of a Pre-19th Century Georgian, Harlots-Esque AU. Fop Kylo. We’re looking at a Half Fop/Half Rake Kylo. 
> 
> There will be a works cited page in the comments section (didn't fit in the end notes)
> 
> The end notes of each chapter will contain your glossary of terms. In the context of some of the more colorful ones: 90% are probably going to be a word for prostitute, brothel, or solicitor of brothels and prostitutes.

**_Easy Virtue:_ ** **A lady of easy virtue, an impure or prostitute.**

 

_“Here youth and beauty are combined, and unadorned by education or art; what she feels in the amorous encounter cannot be feigned. Her natural simplicity is yet so unstained, and her knowledge of the world so very little, that it is almost impossible for her to dissemble; her hair, eye-brows and eyes, are of the deepest black; her complexion of the roses red, and her neck and breasts of the purest white; her limbs are nobly formed, every joint possessing the most enchanting flexibility, which she manages with uncommon dexterity, and her Venus Mount is so nobly fortified, that she has no occasion to dread the fiercest attack, nor does she: and although she is obliged to make sudden retreats, her advances follow so very brisk, and are so effectual, that whene'er she quits the field, waits vice on her lovely shield, but we must advise our lovers of the sport to keep her pleased, as her temper, a little different from another part, is not to be sported with.”_

 

The muddy ass of a pig brushed against his boot as Kylo Ren rounded a cobbled street corner: the child herding the sow into a slaughterhouse did a fine job of letting it run wild and almost ruin a perfectly good pair of breeches. Kylo Ren stopped Hux from his careful reading of this most recent issue of Harris’s List with a walking stick held up in front of his chest.

They halted at the edge of the street just in time.

A carriage rattled past them, more mud spraying in all directions.

“No, no, that won’t do at all.”

Hux cracked a wry smile.

“I can’t see a single fault worthy of objection here: pliant, sensual, and game to put on a good show.”

Kylo adjust his black gloves with an air of disinterest. Hux searched through this neighborhood of nugging-houses for the proper girl like a true hobbyist, and Kylo, even as this was his errand, had gone about it like he was picking through a garden of poor offerings.

“I can’t have a sensuous creature brought to prove to my family that I am reformed. Especially when so sinfully tempted by a Venus Mount. I need a courtesan at least clever enough to make up in accomplishment over virtue.”

“And we shall find one,” Hux replied optimistically, but he merely seemed excited to return to his reading.

“I don’t know why we have to consort with this lowly borough to find a decent Corinth--”

The part of town was in fact correct: Kylo could hear the hissing and panting clicket from a cracked window behind him. A peek gave him a glance of exactly what he did not want: the blind cupid of a beast with two backs in congress.

“--and why Bazine has to sequester herself in that Godless Venetian Salon instead of returning one of the many favors I’ve paid her.”

Hux laughed merrily.

“You’d have to get under all that rouge for her to make introductions to your mother, and we still have no idea if she paints herself like a crusty beau to conceal a pocked face.”

Kylo puffed up defensively.

Given it was Bazine; they’d likely never know.

“I am an excellent judge of character: I would know immediately if she had deceived me so.”

“Well, she must be truly tied up in admirers if she did not stir from her perch at the sum in question. Better Italians than _Frenchified,_ hopefully. Either way we shall have to locate your bride elsewhere.”

Another sloppy collision on the busy street: this one more chaotic than even a muddy pig. Kylo longed for his carriage, but he was suspicious his parents were having it followed, and this errand too thoroughly proved their worst doubts.

This collision was in the form of a girl and a basket of cut flowers. She cursed worse than he did, falling onto her backside in the street from the mass of him knocking her off her feet.

_“Oi!”_

“My apologies, dear doxie,” Hux held a gloved hand down to her, and she glowered up at him with ill-temper heating her freckled cheeks. The girl resembled a dust-cloud around their feet, sprinkled in the flowers that had spilled from her basket from the thorough knocking off her feet Kylo had delivered unto her.

She was so lively while peevish it made his blood rise to a level of pleasure that made his error not-regretted.

A set of outermost purple stays hoisted what small breasts she did have into an effort that, while not admirable, was adorable, and he found himself lost in the modest crevice of her dairy as she sputtered at them both.

Hux was hardly less of the crab lanthorn of the two men, but he loved to pretend he was a charmer when Kylo found himself in a mood gone afoul. He bowed sweetly to help the young woman gather her blooms just to show him up. At least, the five or so that were not squashed.

“What are the flowers for, little miss?”

“They are from all my scores of _admirers,”_ she snapped at him, priggish. Her head bowed while she inspected the salvaged nose-gays: though little could be salvaged under squashing feet on this particular avenue of Corinthians.

“Why does this particular proclamation arise doubt within me?” Kylo inquired, meaning her tone was so smart and falsified, dripping with mockery at Hux.

Her eyes flew up to his: hazel and wide with shock.

“Beg pardon, Good Sir.”

It was an order, not a request. She didn’t look at him, but directly at a little bouquet that had been crushed by a passerby.

“Beg anything,” he replied, stammered more like, “I’m feeling generous. See what you get.”

Her unkempt hair, sweaty from an unseasonably hot Spring day, was hanging in loose curls from her ribbons, making her look quite the blowsabella.

His own heart jumped in his throat when the aim of his sharp jab was fatal instead of just sparring, and his mouth hung as wide-open as hers as he searched for the words to cool her temper.

He found none before her quick tongue struck again:

“Two Casanovas, I see,” she swallowed, her eyes flickering between them as is she were not at all impressed with them and their finery, “perhaps a _School of Venus_ would have much for you both to learn from.”

And she turned on her heel and left them promptly in a cloud of dust and swearing without a second glance.

“What a nasty little creature,” Hux breathed, as though thoroughly entranced.

Kylo’s lips curled in a sneer.

“Quite.”

Hux resumed the book.

“Speaking of Venus, shall I tempt you with this Academician? She goes by London’s Venus--”

“Hux,” Kylo’s heart was still pounding from the encounter with the feral creature, his warniness now set upon his current company, “why do you take such great care in this task of mine?”

It was a fair question to doubt him. Kylo would never, even make the mistake of gambling with Hux again.

Armitage sniffed.

“I should like to see this errand thoroughly completed. You require aid because you are notoriously picksome. An investment in the future of a friend is just as much an investment in my own.”

Hux often spoke with a bitter sting in his words, and never such a time as now did Kylo feel is exquisitely.

He gestured imperiously to the pamphlet his companion was holding.

“Shall we continue?”

Hux bowed his head obediently. He would snivel for himself and only himself, Kylo knew that, but he was too useful to not aid.

“Ah! How about this: _‘She is very active and nimble, and not a little clever in the performance of the act of friction--’_ ” he trailed off as he seemed to be skimming, “ _‘--We are told she always makes it a point to be faithful to her admirers.’_ See, that’s a good Wagtail! _‘--she is a lady of great sensibility, not that her feelings are painful to her, far otherwise, the more her tender sensations are touched, the more pleased she is.’_ ”

They walked on.

Kylo Ren only scarcely listened.

_“‘Cross her palm with a purple flax flower in greeting and she shall know to give an experience of profound rapture. Flax, the flower of felt kindness, and her kindness should be felt to one’s bones...”_

Hux smiled to himself. They had just left behind a spill of flax flowers all over the pavingstones.

“Do you think--?”

Kylo laughed haughtily. _“That_ troublesome thing? I am in doubt that she has any kindness to offer.”

Hux held up the folded magazine.

“I’d bet money on it.”

Kylo’s fingers twitched at the wager: something his friend knew would provoke him irrefutably.

“Enough to renew my inheritance?”

His companion did shake his head then in good humor. “I say we seek the child out again. She could fulfill our purposes.”

“Our purposes?”

“Your inheritance, for one,” Hux steered him cheerily down the path the little Venus disappeared down, “and _my own_ being to distract you from the loss of your prized Bazine.”

* * *

The flower-girl Rey pressed a kiss to Master Finn’s shoulder when he let her through the stable door: in greeting, sisterly, as the day had not yielded many successes in her wares. The flowers that were not crushed did not sell.

“People just aren’t buying flowers, Finn,” she wheedled, swiping her feet through the hay to build a little nest for herself. He had been kind enough to let her sleep her in the last few months, waking her before any sign of danger, but pickings were slimmer and slimmer with each passing day.

“They’re sweet, country blooms, Rey,” He slid an arm around her shoulders, squeezing in comfort. They sagged miserably at the added weight. “Perhaps it is just not the right place for country blooms...”

She softened when her friend pressed a sweet kiss to her brow.

"...and I think they're pretty no matter where they grow."

"Finn," she grinned widely. "that's half a sonnet right there, you must write that one down!"

He smiled back, their grins both matching in childlike innocence and ferocity. He stumbled out of the deep stall to find a scrap of paper. 

She allowed herself a moment of weakness: collapsing onto her back in the hay pile. Straw tickled her ears. 

Snap, a fellow stablehand, poked a head in through the bars.

“I’d like some of your country blooms, Miss Rey.”

Rey’s nose wrinkled.

Without a word, she swung a pitchfork out of the stack and pointed it menacingly at him: who, as most harmless things do, barely heeded her warning.

No flap with a fox tail would deter him.

“Hush up, wag.”

Unhindered, he kept going, “I would not die for my country, but I would die for _your_ country--”

“She’s heard enough,” Finn lashed at him, chasing him away from the gap in the stable bars, and Rey sagged back into the pile of hay. It used to be such a sweet smell. However, in the city, it was always faintly wet, and grimy.

Those men who sneered at her like she was a sewer rat were maybe not so above her as to make that judgement: but merely using their working eyes. 

Once she and Finn were alone again, he nudged her ankle with his foot.

“What are your plans for the evening?”

“Hopefully sleeping for the rest of my days, Finn, why?” she opened two eyes squinted in distrust. She knew that tone. 

He chuckled at her.

“There’s a word about town that a certain someone whose fighter bested by The Scavenger claims he would have the rematch.”

Rey tilted her head back in the hay with a sigh. She was exhausted. She’d wandered up and down the streets all day. Streets of Punch Houses, with men looking for something to toss into the hands of a lady of easy virtue. All the while never letting herself be sold like the wares inside. 

Even when they plucked at her laces and curls and muttered through clenched, stubbled jaws to try and find a better price for a knocking in an alley, as though the cost should be less without a bed.

Virtue was a price she paid for with every breath she took.

“That fight-bully is claiming that I would lose to that sow again? The same fight-bully who, if I recall his choice words about my honor, has also personally lost at my hand _twice_ before outside of the ring in a true fight?”

Finn’s smile was warm and sly.

“He called you a rook. Said you hid a weapon in your bodice.”

This was more than virtue: this was about honor, pure and simple. She was no cheat.

“The man shall lose his purse for those words.”

* * *

 

 

These were the only _punches_  in which Rey dealt. Her fists, the shocking rush of a strike to the face whipping her head back like a child spinning in one place.

Everyone was here for money, or drink, or for some feral instinct that they could not satisfy by hunting.

She was here because it felt like a game.

And because when she won a few coins crossed her palm.

Plutt’s fighter was a stocky hausfrau who had lost all over her children to a fever the previous winter: she had nothing to lose and had blackened Rey’s eye on more than one occasion.

Bruised her up awful, but never beaten her.

The ring was smelly and wet, wet from spilled drink, wet from the soiled crowd, wet from mess: the muddy earth strangely warm around her ankles as it leeched through her stockings.

Her clothing was ripped. She felt air, mud, and eyes on a place that should not be looked at. But all she did when the cheering intensified was shout _"do you see a weapon in this bodice?"_ to the crowd, who hollered with mocking laughter at the joke at Plutt's expense. 

Plutt was worse than a bully, a pimp, in those he represented. He would not stop these petty challenges until Rey lost.

She would not lose to the word of a man like that.

* * *

 

 

Rey’s skull rang like St. Margaret’s Bells as Finn helped her out of the ring, their winnings in his fist, howling in her deafened ear like the victors they were.

He hauled a flagon of something strong to her breast, congratulatory, but Rey could only think of the stupid mistakes she had made in her fight. There were too many chances given for the old sow to land a facer on her, her cheek swelled massively already.

She had _barely_ won.

No one in the crowd particularly cared, her breast was almost ripped out of her bodice and that in itself was the fight, but she could have badly damaged her hands with Plutt’s lady fighter playing fast and dirty, and she needed to be more careful with herself.

“Where my smile?” he was trying to get it, but failed, and his eyes were sad, “you are the only woman who can emerge from a fighting ring, even the building that houses it, giggling like a child.”

Finn would be leaving to care for the stables of his master’s summer home: and she had bigger problems than a broken finger when he was out of town. Problems such as where she would sleep.

She pulled her ripped bodice up to cover her mud-flecked breast, which was slumping out from the fragile material not lasting the fight. They never did. Her clothes were a patchwork of what she could find: purple stays from another dress with the too-small sleeves ripped off, the brown skirt of a second over the white bodice of yet another. She resembled a dolly made by a young child with only scraps from their mother's sewing-basket.

She sweated so much onto those clothes anyway. As if it mattered if the pretty flowers all matched sweetly together. 

“Not tonight,” she said with a sad smile, bumping her shoulder to his.

Finn handed her the whole purse, as he was wary of this as well. She sucked down her drink, shaking her head and she almost choked on the power of it.

“That’s half yours,” she protested with great upset, but he assuaged her quickly with a hand on her elbow.

“Rey, consider it my goodbye present.”

His eyes were kind but sad.

They wove together under the slatted board seats of the crowd, able to hear murmurs of conversation between the fights for a celebratory drink. When those were going on all else was deafened in yells. Hers was the last lady brawl of the evening: always an event when she took the ring. Most nights ended the least exciting way if it meant that she had gone into the ring at the middle. Anyone bloodthirsty and with a feel for this place know of this. There were protesting groans at the two fighters announced after her, and even more suggestions the victor fight her. Despite the spectacle, it was not done, it was too debased, which fairly seemed possible here.

Regardless, she was one of the best fighters in the city, she’d reckon in the top five when she’d had a full meal.

Tonight, she’d barely won, because she had not had one in a while.

Her bruised hand weighed heavy on her dearest friend’s shoulder.

“Oh.”

He glanced down at her, eyebrows raised.

“What is it?”

“That mincer over there,” she pointed to the two men at the entrance, but most distinct was the one in the black-and-gold ensemble that was both art and eyesore. Maybe since he wore it with such a smug look of boredom when people were fighting in front of him with utter brutality, “ruined half my flowers today, stomped them into the street, and didn’t even pay a half penny for my troubles.”

“What a cock,” Finn muttered, hovering protectively over her shoulder.

Rey shook her head, her hair coming loose from the tight knot she bound it in before the fight. Now it was a fine time to fall: in the ring it would have been ripped clean out at the roots.

“I’ve some mind to ask for my money for the damages,” she said haughtily, that strong drink heating her belly.

“I don’t think a lawman will agree with your case--”

Rey sauntered over to the benches the two men sat in:

“Empty-handed as we are now, it will only make when our hands are full of that little strumpet all the sweeter.”

Her nose wrinkled. Finn was at her elbow, both of them now underneath the seats of the ring, with the two gentleman in plain but unknowing sight.

The ruddy one was talking, not the dark one. It was a struggle to name who she liked the least.

“We’ll find her,” this was his companion who spoke, who wore a luminously white powdered wig but was clearly of bright red hair underneath, his brows a dead giveaway. The one who did not stoop to assist with her flowers this morning was closely, broodingly, watching the fight as he prattled on. “Perhaps you should budget your purse on obtaining the little flax-girl, not betting on--”

“The little flax-girl may very well be the finest courtesan in all of London.”

Finn squeezed her hand, hard enough to make her whimper. He covered her mouth quickly, so not to be discovered, but she gaped up at the man on the seat above her, so close, his massive stockinged leg stretching out just inches from her face.

He thought he’d be...obtaining her, did he? Her face flushed with rage.

His friend patted his shoulder like a pouting child, as he did quite look like one in the moment.

“A Public Ledger is a Public Ledger. Enough coin is all the same to them. We shall find London’s Venus. Perhaps she takes a daily walk with her suitor’s gifts through that same avenue. We shall try again tomorrow there; and see if she is more easily persuaded with an offering of flax.”

“They think I’m--” she mouthed frantically at Finn, pointing up to the seat-slat above her head. His eyes widened.

Despite her wrath and horror: he looked delighted for her.

 _“Think_ of the _coin--”_ he mouthed back, pointing just as animatedly at the edge of a fine coat.

She shook her head. When he didn’t wipe that stupid grin off his face right away: she slugged upon his arm. Finn struggled not to cry out to alert the men above them.

Humiliating. Mistaken in her honest trade for a Hedge Whore.

“I sincerely doubt that anyone would pass up a paid holiday at the fine estate of Falconridge: it might be lovely for a whore to be given coin while on her back with no sweaty pig writhing on top of her for the first time since she was sold to a bawd. All she needs is charm.”

She had once thought the darker man the viler of the two: but the speech of his bewigged companion was a stronger damnation. At least the tall one was quiet.

Still, she could not help raising her eyebrows.

_Paid holiday?_

Finn was holding out his hand, missing what was being said, his palm collecting a fine white powder as the wig gesticulated. His hair-powder was raining down on them.

Both of them shuddered, Rey frantically trying to wipe away the powder that coated her sweaty skin, and scampered off outside the fighting house with their winnings to plot, and maybe find themselves a celebratory pie or two.

* * *

 

 

“You respectable sirs have missed the event of the year: a truly bloody scrape between our best ladies.”

“Barbaric,” Hux murmured into his drink.

“The odds were stacked: there was two hundred pounds on one scrappy little thing. The victor.”

Everyone tried to speak with them at these fights: the clothes horses they were meant for heavy purses. This was a constant irritant of these foul gents attempting to scheme a few coins out of them. Bets, better seats, a safe walk home with their skills as a protector. Plotting to lead them to an alley to be beaten and robbed.

Though he still refused to dress to match the current lightness of his purse.

Kylo Ren tried not to let the venom enter his blood, but it was like a shot of lightning in his brain. Like some invisible force cracked a whip over his very being.

If he were to return to Falconridge within the week, upon his mother’s labored invitation for his ailing father, he would not be in any fighting rings or gambling houses for the whole of the Summer.

He could practice virtue before then to make the transition into being a good son easier.

Or dedicate himself to plenty vice like a man in his last days.

He had found his purpose in choosing the latter. Wasn’t that the thing about penance? One could keep asking and asking, and the poor many who chose virtue would have to make the real work of forgiving. He’d rather have something to repent for than be tasked with accepting the sins of others.

After an afternoon of _thorough research,_ he still felt he had not acquired the right girl. Something always gave them away, but the gutter-snipe disguised Aphrodite was so lively that one missed the more course aspects of her, she had such a lovely countenance under the dirt that he would believe dressed properly she was exactly what the catalogue described.

Perhaps those rags were just her roaming-clothes, to wander freely without being besieged by admirers. 

That little vestal of lust, however rough looking on the street, came well-reviewed enough that he could trust the words written in Harris’s List. Perhaps a man just needed to make his proper offering and conquer away.

Bazine was a difficult creature: perhaps instead of trying to curry her favor it would be best knowing and getting exactly what he paid for. Instead of a Summer of advance-rebuke-attack as he had come to expect from his lady friend. A week ago he would have spit fire at the implication he could trust this stranger over Bazine. But as her presence faded, her lingering influence, as did his blind faith in her.

The poetic prose and promises of the magazine was sunk deep into his skull now. Unable to be removed. He needed to find her again. Just the wildness in her eyes was making something rise in him...

He had to find London’s Venus.

“That last fight ye gentlemen missed,” a greasy stranger jostled him with his elbow, “madness. Sweet bruising. A tit ripped out of a young lady’s bodice, the victor, but she still fought instead of hiding her nudity. She beat her opponent soundly, yelling for someone, anyone, who could best her. They almost set a man upon her then: if she is so convinced she could win a boxing match against one.”

His nose curled at the lascivious details.

“That creature sounds utterly disgusting to me.”

* * *

 

“This is ridiculous,” Rey pulled at the lended butter-yellow dress covering her skinny form, “as though we could convince them for a moment that I am the finest Drury Lane Vestal in all of London.”

The lace mitts on her hands made her palms itch.

It was, at least, all one dress.

Finn laughed from his spot by the red-brick wall, keeping safely away from the traffic as Rey tugged and adjusted the unfamiliar garment. Everything was too tight.

“Finn,” she whined, her face bright red, “my _dairy’s_ going to pop out.”

“Well, try and hold it in until they come looking for them. They’re coming. I’m sure they can smell them from wherever they are.”

She hissed at him, swatting his arm.

The ruddy rouge on her cheeks was making her face itch. But it was covering a sound bruise from last night’s punch.

“We don’t even know for sure what the offer even is.”

“Than that seems like the finest reason to at least hear them out.”

“What if he tries to... _stive_ with me?”

“Stall him as long as you can, plant a facer on him when he tries, and then take the money he’s given you.”

That sounded like a neatly-crafted plan when all she would be doing was stalling. But how to stall was another plan in itself. How to escape. How to get the money up front.

“This will never work. I look ridiculous.”

“A flushed face is a flushed cunny, Rey. You look lively.”

“Please Finn, we’ve all but shared a breast, please never use the word _cunny--”_

The rhythm click of a walking stick halted on the stone down the lane.

“Has no one taught the lady that business should not be conducted _in the street.”_

Oh, the impetuous whine of that bewigged ginger. At least she did not need to pretend to love _him._ Only the darkly brooding one of the pair.

She’d rather make love to a dark brick wall than a hissing fox.

She bit back a fearsome growl of irritation.

Finn was giving her a frantic look, to remember what they had hastily practiced. _Coy. Seductive. Inviting._

A creature from a life that was the opposite of squalor.

“Fortunately for you gentlemen, my business is,” she said slowly, drawing the basket of flax to settle under her constricted bosom.

The tall, dark man stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A slow smile spread across his full lips.

“It would seem, Hux, that our _romp_ has found us instead of us finding it.”

He neared her with single-minded self-assurance of his aims, but halted at the red flare of her cheeks. A thumb came out, like a kitchen maid or a governess, slashing through the coat of cosmetic to wipe it away like dirt. She shivered at the severity in his eyes: like he already knew that she was lying.

The sting on her cheek was not actually shame, as she initially thought: he had revealed her bruise with one fell swoop from the pad of his thumb.

 _“What is this?”_ he whispered hotly, as though sold a load of bad goods.

The man at his elbow sniffed, the black dot painted on his cheek twitching with the motion like a rabbit whisker.

“A shame, she’s marked.”

The back of her hand swept up to cover her bruised cheek.

“My lord,” she whispered. He locked eyes with her, unexpectedly, for Rey thought the ruse would end right there, with her exposed skin.

Holding his full attention in her palm, she kept him waiting for a moment in a search for what to say.

Demure. Accommodating. Seductive.

“Who did this to you?” he examined her with piercing brown eyes.

_A lady who could best you in a fight, no doubt._

“It doesn’t matter,” she looked away and feigned a sad pout, “I came back for you today. _Hoping.”_

That was pleasure, wasn’t it? Having someone want you, return for you, to come back?

He was silent, his nostrils flaring. This man wore no wig, unlike his friend, his black locks curling long a leonine down to his shoulders. The intensity of his gaze made her feel like the crushed flax from yesterday, stomped under the heel of the shoe.

“I…”

What had they said about the flax? That it was from admirers?

 _She_ had said that.

She looked at the full basket in her arms.

“You brought none for me,” she said softly, her eyes lighting upon the cobblestones with a breath of disappointment.

His eye twitched.

“Am I to be tossed in the basket with the rest of them?”

She swallowed, and despite being her only plans for money for the day: overturned the basket into the street. Stomping one under her heeled shoe.

His nostrils flared as if taking snuff, harsh and loud, in satisfaction at her gesture.

“Have you come for me?” she tilted her chin bravely up at him, having sacrificed the favor of others, at least through her ruse. It felt off to pretend to toss out symbols of affection when she had none other than the dress Finn procured for her, squeezing her so tight.

“I have,” he said with a nod. “A friendly proposition for someone who can make money on her toes as well as her back.”

Her bosom heaved nervously at the end of that sentence.

His smile curled upon his lips.

“Just as well as she does on her back, I should say. I find myself in need of a virtuous woman. Not wanting to defile one under false pretenses: I roam this particular avenue for one capable of _pretending_ to be one.”

“Do you wish to make me complicit in a farce or a crime?”

“Deception that only rewards us all,” he said smoothly. “I have found myself in a reasonably misunderstood position-”

“-disowned,” his companion supplied.

Rey narrowed her eyes. She would have felt guilt over her dishonesty of a man less deserving of it.

Food. Shelter. Safety.

Her eyes scanned his massive frame.

 _Relative_ safety. 

“--of which I would like to remedy through making a better life for myself. Such reformations, in my family’s eyes, would not be social but...spiritual. They would like to see me redeemed for my past offenses by a good woman. Trouble is, I don’t happen to know any good women.”

“The scheme, then?” she sighed.

This got boring quite fast. Just the petty affairs of wealthy families of a man undeserving of even their unearned status.

“May we ask the nature of these past offenses,” Finn, at her elbow, lost sight of the sport as quickly as she had.

“Gambling,” The man in the wig laughed, “women. Nefarious characters.”

“A duel,” the man offering her a proposal, a temporary one, kept her gaze. “Specifically a duel.”

He was only speaking with her.

“What are the terms?”

“You will attend a visit to the family home for the length of the summer. Appropriate clothing will be provided for. I will be your keeper. You, in return, must use your cultivated skills as a courtesan to convince them you are a cultured woman of virtue. It shouldn’t be too hard. Your kind lie all the time.”

His voice seemed to sting when he said it: old wounds.

“Have we got a deal?”

Rey looked down at her spilled basket of unsold blooms.

“If this is to be done, this is to be done proper for me. No true lady of means would be poked by her respectable fiance. You shall treat me with the same dignity you would a true lady of breeding, and I shall act as one.”

Ren’s eyes sharpened on hers for a moment.

“You mean to say, you shall enjoy the luxury inside my _country estate,_ but I will not be granted access to yours?”

He hit the _“unt”_ with feeling so she would not miss the meaning of his percussive tongue. not even Snap had to be that obvious. Mankind’s fondness with that pun was starting to get ridiculous. She resisted giving him a sound smack.

_Prove you can be a lady._

“No,” she insisted, her chin high, “and if you insist I’ll know for sure your offer is not sound: for you would not be dedicated to the ruse of your own making.”

His eyes flickered with something like appreciation, she dared not say admiration, but a blend of amusement and annoyance and surprise.

“What care do you have for my aims as long as it is paid?”

“Because there is more reward to be had for virtue in this game, for both of us, and I so long to feel your balsam weigh across my palm, good sir.”

He gave her the money with a delighted glint in his eye. Rey had never been so bold in her short years being on this earth as she did with this young Lord. Perhaps because she was pretending: perhaps because she could be anyone.

It was thrilling.

“The role I play is a woman of virtue. And allowing you to ravish me while I play one seems most uncouth. And the proper way to ruin your plans and get us both caught.”

“She’s a clean cleave, underneath the hair,” his ginger companion made amends to his judgement of her. Rey tried not to laugh. A _cleave_ might look like a virgin even if she wasn’t one: Rey was a virgin who didn’t look like one. Whatever looking like a _virgin_ even meant.

For all their talk of its value: rich men couldn’t properly assess the worth of a printed-five-pound-note by reading the print on it

And this almost decided the matter for her. He was from a rich family, and Lord only knew that those sorts were careless with their thick ribbins.

He wasn’t looking at his friend. He was looking at her. Aptly.

"You shall go un-seduced, then?"

It was a question, maybe even a wager, to her even more than it was a promise from himself. 

An attack on her honor. Her weakness. 

"I dare say I shall, if you do not break like a feeble doll under the assault of my charms."

That snapped him rigid as well, both of them sharing an adversarial stare. 

“Well then," he began, adjusting his coat, "Shall you be my _wife in water colors_ for a summer _,_ or should I leave you to the finest cullies in Covent Garden?”

She supposed that was her choice: with Finn gone, with the stables no longer a safe place to stow a virgin.

He offered his hand to seal the bargain: as she would seal her fate.

 _Town_ or _country._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NUGGING-HOUSE: A brothel
> 
> CORINTH/CORINTHIANS: A brothel (Corinthians thereby meaning brothel-dwellers)
> 
> CLICKET: Copulation of foxes; and thence used, in a canting sense, for that of men and women
> 
> BLIND CUPID: The backside
> 
> CRUSTY BEAU: One that uses paint and cosmetics, to obtain a fine complexion.
> 
> FRENCHIFIED: Infected with the venereal disease.
> 
> DOXIE: She beggars, wenches, prostitutes
> 
> DAIRY: Breasts
> 
> CRAB LANTHORN: A peevish fellow
> 
> BLOWSABELLA: A woman whose hair is dishevelled, and hanging about her face; a slattern
> 
> SCHOOL OF VENUS: A brothel
> 
> ACADEMICIAN: Prostitute
> 
> NOTORIOUSLY PICKSOME: Picky, selective
> 
> FLAP WITH A FOX TAILl: Rude dismissal
> 
> WAG: An arch-frolicsome fellow
> 
> BULLY: Pimp
> 
> PUNCH HOUSES: Brothel
> 
> LAND A FACER. To punch in the face. Also referred to as plant a facer
> 
> ROOK: A cheat
> 
> TO SWIVE. To copulate
> 
> ROMP: A forward wanton girl, a tomrig
> 
> BALSAM: Money
> 
> CLEAVE, CLEFT, OR CLOVEN: A term used for a woman who passes for a maid, but is not one
> 
> RIBBIN. Money. The ribbin runs thick; i.e. there is plenty of money
> 
> WIFE IN WATER COLORS. A mistress, or concubine; water colours being, like their engagements, easily effaced, or dissolved
> 
> CULLY: Brothel-Dweller; solicitor of prostitutes
> 
> TOWN. A woman of the town; a prostitute
> 
> Works Cited will be posted in the comments below just so the glossary+end notes is not half the freaking page. Harris’s List is quoted directly (with some paraphrasing/additions to suit Rey’s description) in scenes where Hux is reading aloud from the magazine.


	2. high keeping

**_High Keeping:_ ** **The extravagant maintenance of a prostitute in expensive lodgings**

  
  


His blood surged when she took his hand to firmly shake in the middle of the street. 

Sealing them together in this saga with the brush of cool skin. 

“Firstly,” he licked his lips, assessing the straight-standing minx at his feet. She came just up to his chin, but a proper wig would surpass her height up to his nose. 

Though the wig would cover the hair that was plainly beneath his face to examine. If dirty, it was pretty, and smelling of warm hay. He was not sure he’d have it powdered just yet: maybe for special occasions. Last he saw of them, his parents had yet to embrace wigs. There was a comely blonde at Church services, devil knows the last time he was in attendance, with unpowdered hair that his mother had pushed at him in his early years. 

Back when there was even a chance of him living a modest life out in the country. That slim chance burned out long ago, and that match, like all the other attempts, was unsuccessful.

He assessed the Fen in front of him with a much more calculating eye than he did his own potential brides. This had to be more convincing of indicators of status, and wealth. This had to pass through the sieve of his own judgement, not just someone his parents would choose but he would choose. They knew him too well to see him settle for anything less than his taste. 

The trouble was he had never really determined his taste outside of rebellion from theirs.

While the desire to have anything done with her hair was abated, he was eager to have her dressed in something other than that awful yellow gown. It wasn’t sartorially horrendous, but it just didn’t suit her. He even longed for the purple stays over her dress from the other day, her slender waist hugged prettily by a modest silk pattern, with her basket she stood before him looking pastoral and sweet like a spring briar.

Courtesans were above all, actresses, and from what he had read of her she would put on a fine performance. Still, up close, greasepaint that cast an elegant glow on a stage would give them away to anyone scrutinizing closely. It was the nature of the illusion. An intimate one.

Right now she was a messy little fighter in borrowed finery: a  beau-nasty dressing her filthy skin in silk to please his eye. She had to be refined.

“We should find something for that bruise,” he said instead: the more glaring of their immediate problems. 

Her hand flashed out to cover her eye: the powder caked over it not doing nearly enough to disguise the shadow as she had clearly hoped.

Her arched eyebrows raised in surprise. 

“Oh,” her hand fluttered to her purple cheek, “apologies for my...unkempt appearance.”

His nose was curled at even the mention. 

Devil to the man who did that to her. If there were more time available to him, he’d take up a duel over that disgrace upon her first.

_ Inheritance first. Then duel.  _

“I suppose this is where I leave you to it,” Hux clapped him sportingly on the back. “Pay the girl. Tuppence for your  _ Tup. _ Don’t be too rough on her.”

With him vanishing into a Nugging-House, with her Bully standing there behind her, there were three left in the narrow street.

Fashion could wait in the direst of circumstances, pray no one ever tell Bazine the thought even crossed his mind of she’d think his mind decayed in her absence. 

Rey herself was stuck still on the paving stones.

One glance at Finn and a thousand words passed between them. The kindness, belief, and a little bit of cold reality was in his eyes. 

It wasn’t just that he knew she could do this. It was beyond that. She  _ had _ to do this.

Perhaps she should play the Lady by not speaking of such unpleasant things? To smile, and ignore anything painful?

Lord Ren was taking up her arm in his elbow.

“Your kind heart, I’m sure, puts you in the grasp of the most deplorable of characters.” 

Ren’s charitable tone told her all: to all things less than pleasing, simply ignore it. 

  
  


* * *

 

“I can’t wear this.”

It was strange indeed, to have to tamp down her scandal at being seen in her all but  unrigged by him already, to give up now. After having to fight the storm of modesty by standing in the center of her room in the new underthings funded through his pocket. 

Her ribbons laced with his ribbins. 

She’d thought that was the hardest battle long over: until they laced her until the dress that was supposed to be more  _ modest _ than undergarments.

Then the young lord circled her like a hawk, a tight circle, in the rented room. 

She couldn’t breathe.

She couldn’t breathe because her waist was being cinched so tight that she thought she’d never be able to stand up straight. This wasn’t the ill-fit of the yellow gown: everything that lifted in this blue one was intentionally hefted up and constricted. 

It was strangling her insides.

He sniffed at her protestations. The milliner pulling the laces ever-tighter was clearly used to such negotiations with mistresses. She kept working to Ren’s specifications; not Rey’s. 

“It’s  _ French.” _

“It’s exposing my  dugs,” she snapped quickly back.

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed them.”

She glared at him.

Him noting how little there was to notice did not endear him to her one bit.

There was a pinch and a squeeze from the milliner behind her, yanking one last lucky tug to prop Rey’s modest breast into two half-moons hanging over the lace. 

“It seems your Keeper’s spent much time abroad: the French tend to not notice these displays.” 

Rey bowed her head to her sternum. Of course she was but a toy for Lord Ren from now until summer’s end. 

But he didn’t need to make a mockery of her body.

“There’s not much there to tempt anyone, and you do have to look like something I’d chosen for myself. You’ll look like a  chicken-breasted maiden when this fine lady is done with you,” he promised, pacing towards the window with a bored expression. “It’s fashionable. We won’t have you in a neckerchief. The neck can be kept open. It’s hot as blazes out at Falconridge.”

Her skin was hot enough to sear right in this room.  _ Chicken-breasts. _ Even if it was a swell of relief, at least it should have been, that the Lord wasn’t the least bit attracted to her; he could feign the  _ risk _ of catching fancy instead of being so rude. 

She crossed her arms, and despite his cold attitude, his eyes did latch to her newly-hefted breasts like an infant would to suck them. While inconvenient and absolutely ridiculous for fighting, should she ever need to get out of a pinch in the way she was most accustomed: the interested silence he took when he did brush his gaze over her curve of her tits. 

She used this at first with a little embarrassment at her shamelessness, glad he was not looking instead at her red face, and then by the hour honed it into a fine tool. She had no fists, her back arched and shoulders restricted by the gowns he had selected for her to preen in all summer, so she had to make weapons another way. By afternoon it was to the point she was so well-armed she was in fact able to select her own garments at least matched one for one by his choices. He insisted on a red gown. She wanted a muted peach one, something for mass, though she had not even been crossed through the threshold of a church even to be christened the name Rey. She just wanted something more modest than his selections, and one push of her inner upper arms against her ribs fluffed up her bosom so well he was in a fit of distraction that had him most agreeable to her suggestions. 

By the end of the day, she had the designs for a new wardrobe that would be completed by the end of the week. 

This plan was audacious: it would require pluck to the backbone for Rey to take it on at her most prepared. 

A glance in the mirror almost convinced her of her capability: she had been washed and her hair combed before even the simplest of muslin was allowed to touch her skin, at Ren’s insistence. She looked the part, in this French-y dress. Less like a  game pullet than she anticipated. 

Even with her tits halfway up to her chin.

 

* * *

 

It was raining when they set a course for Falconridge.

Lord Ren’s carriage was as ornate as a snuff-box, and being so large made the opulence be set on wheels all the more absurd. Filigree of such fine detail was not meant to travel through mud and rock, through such rough country, and with every mile Rey could see the apparentness of that fact twitch on Lord Ren’s face, as though brow-bitten by a mosquito of irritation with every rough bump.

“This cannot be our mode of transport,” she gasped out, looking equally comical at the edge of the steps of the Church from which she would be collected to join him. Across the street, the butcher’s shop was reeking of a cut that had gone bad: and overtop that reek was a stench of strong spice that it was being cured in to cover the reek. 

His hackles had risen and his blood ran cold to see her sneer down at him from her place on the church steps. All of the possessions he had acquired for her, the dresses, the trimmings, the shoes, all of them were already packed. Still, he was surprised to see her completely empty-handed, and even more surprised to see her glowering at his  _ pride and joy. _

“Is it not sufficient?”

“It is  _ Versailles,” _ she coughed out, eyes traveling the gilt on every possible inch of the exterior. “In it’s entirity, gardens included.”

He was so overcome with offense he forgot his manners, and she struggled her way into the coach without assistance. 

It was high up, and built for speed over comfort despite all the decoration. A tiny grunt left her mouth when she had settled back into the seat.

His eyes narrowed, and she caught it, and they settled into a moment of tense awkwardness. 

“I just…”

_ “What?” _

She had not struck him as a fiery temptress, but perhaps that was the essence of her heralded charm? He had assumed mystery, or a lurking sensuality, but so far her powers had been implied and unseen. 

He still knew they were there just by looking at her. 

Her temper surely had a certain heat to it, turned on him now in full focus.

“Those noises...please learn to keep them to yourself when we arrive at my parents’ estate. It is not the place for your professional...vocalizations…”

While he expected this to set her further into anger, she went very pale and her lips thinned, bitten together between her teeth. 

She nodded. 

A warmth settled in his chest that she was taking this ruse seriously, even though just a quickly a pain entered his chest when she slid her eyes from his and stared at the window as they rolled along the streets.

The ride was a long and silent one for most of the journey. But once they exited the city and even the villages tossed amongst the hills outside of it, Rey seemed to soften and relax, despite the way her dress wore her and not the other way around. A smile even seemed to bloom across her lips when they were in the most primitive of locations: not an inn or pub in sight.

“What amuses you?” he asked quickly, selfishly, because she had something in her eyes between her and whatever was out the window and he wanted her to share. 

“I’ve never seen so much green before in my life,” she answered softly, her tone tender, and he was so taken aback by the genuine spirit of happiness in her voice that he had nothing to say to what she had given.

It sat unfurled on his lap, the sentiment, and his hands twitched at his sides.

She glanced at him, her eyes both bright and sleepy, the rain rattling against the glass pane beside her cheek.

“When were you last at Falconridge?”

At this he sniffed, glad to be off any subject that enhanced her beauty. It was most distracting. 

“It’s been years since I’ve seen my family. I have spent most of my life living without their support, making my own destiny,” he toyed with the tassel on the cushion beside him. Rey kept moving the ones around her so they stacked in a pile on the seat next to her, which mildly insulted him that she so pointedly moved them out of the way, “but my father is an old man, and nearing the end of his life...there are things that belong to me, a legacy, that must be obtained before it’s too late.”

“Then you are here  by weeping cross,” her tone grew ever-colder by the moment. “To beg for forgiveness for whatever reason they cast you out, only atoning to collect what’s yours, and to only commit to turning your back on them when it suits you?”

He blinked at her. 

“That’s a very uncharitable way to describe it, such family affairs are complicated. If you came from the same place, you’d know it all too well.”

_ “The same place,” _ she replied flatly.

It was a question and yet it was not. It still made him answer.

He wasn’t going to say anything straight away, it was better to hold such observations back until they were useful: but he did watch her hands curl into fists in her skirts like a snake curling to strike. 

“The position that places you here right now lacks the structure of the world I was born into. If you had the luxury of a family home in the country, would I have found you in a bed in a brothel?”

“You didn’t find me in a brothel at all,” she reminded him, her teeth clicking as she worked every syllable with hot precision. 

“Yes, yes, formalities,” he flicks a hand in a dismissive way that makes her blood rise in temperature, “speaking of which, you do have enough by way of topics of conversation picked out for this evening? I can’t expect you to put on the air for it all summer, God knows these people are draining, but I think a strong first impression and my continued love of you should hold them off when, come July or so, your efforts in decorum begin to slacken.”

July?  _ July _ was when he’d expect her to be performing lower than her peak?

She swallowed.

That would mean weeks of excellence poured into this ruse.

“I have no plans by way of my efforts.”

“What?”

Rey, the innocent bloom momentarily gone from her cheeks, stared at him as though this was obvious. She spoke to him as if he were dumb:

“How can I? You haven’t condescended yourself to me to even explain what they are yet.”

He opened his mouth to answer her, an expression on his face heightening the strange, terrified look in her eye, when the carriage lurched to a halt. 

Before being able to discuss the matter further, they had already arrived at Falconridge.

 

* * *

 

Rey would not be coming quickly down from the carriage. 

He had wanted her to come already able to know what to do. She had assumed if he were picking a whore up off a muddy street he would do something by way of training, and here she was, raw as fresh-slaughtered beef, and he had done nothing to prepare her for hungry dogs.

Kylo Ren, the ill-planning gentleman, seemed just as unsuitably prepared to help her down from her perch upon the plush carriage seat. Her hands clutched tight to the silk brocade. 

He cleared his throat, but that did not move her. 

The hand he offered to help her down proved insufficient: Rey looked at the ground of Falconridge with a crook of distrust hoisting one nostril up like the edge of a skirt over a muddy puddle. 

He waved the offered hand in front of her eyes once more so she’d stop gawking and take it.

“My lambkin,” he purred with a perceptible distaste, “please place your hand in mine so that I may help you safely to the ground.”

She blinked at him, on edge, from her seat in the carriage. 

It was then the flower-girl realized the depths of her lies. 

Some harlots could play harpsichord. It crossed her dreams last night. She would be in the pretty silk things that Kylo had bought for her, seated at the instrument at the request of his mother. Because not just courtesans had these skills: most fine ladies had a talent of some kind in performance. 

Rey had none, so in the dream, she sat there as the candles burned down, and everyone in the room waited for her private concert, and Kylo glowered at her in the corner. For some reason, he was wearing a black, hook-nosed Venetian mask. And she sat there. Sweating and embarrassing herself. Badly. 

The sound she let out instead of a song was a single chicken-squawk, but that was very much brought on by the hen that had nested herself in the hay beside her head in the night. 

She flew to consciousness with a start at the noise, convinced she had made it herself. 

And yet in the dream it was all very terrifying, and Rey woke in a cold sweat before tearing off to the  seraglio to meet Lord Ren to depart.

Only now she had seen his intention for her not stopping as a fine-looking women to grace his hand and stay pretty and silent for a few days. He had really taken on a woman-of-all-work to be at his beck and call, rise to every demand, until she could prove his worth better than he himself could. 

Cowed from her spot in the carriage, she stared at the final step she had to make until she was truly at her most vulnerable. Not only was she keeping up his charade, but her own. 

“A hand’s not going to keep me out of the mud,” she protested in a whisper, melting back into the brocade lining of his ridiculous carriage seat. Maybe she could stay in the preposterous thing forever. She could live more comfortably in the plush compartment than anywhere else she’d lived in her entire life. 

He looked annoyed to the core with her.

“Shall I carry you like a sack of flour into the drawing room?” he suggested in a tone that was not unlike a threat. “Lay you out on the table like a corpse? You will be taken from the house in the same manner if you continue…”

No answer came out, only a defiant flush to her cheeks. If her legs wouldn’t start working, he’d have to. He made a grab for her.

She swung out and slapped him.

She thrust her head through the open door of the carriage only far enough the hiss in his face as he staggered back.

“You will not threaten such a scene to make leave of me, for a failure in choosing me is admitting fault of your own to  _ your family, _ and I know you will not disgrace yourself with a display like that for two parents so disappointed in your previous choices.”

He blinked at her, his cheek glowing fiercely red. Black hair streaked messily across his flushed face.

She went stock still. 

Not exactly from the look of his eyes, which was fierce and glowing up at her, but at the tear in the shoulder of her dress. Already she ruined the charade. It was over.

“I did not mean I would kill you,” his tone was already quieter if not kinder, offering his hand but much less threateningly this time, “I just...that you were so stiff, I wouldn’t know how else to move you.”

Rey heaved a tired sigh. She couldn’t just give up now. She’d be indebted for the clothes he had made for her. She’d be stranded out here until she found a way back to London. And there was food and shelter on the line.

“My dress…”

He shook his head.

“Can’t be helped now. We’ll say you tore it climbing down from this horrific rigging.”

Still, she did not trust his hand.

His eyes bugged out of their sockets when she secured a gloved hand on the nape of his neck and then clung on his upper arm to slide out of the carriage to land on her braced tiptoes. 

“This is not how it is done,” he hissed darkly in her ear, but she didn’t dare recoil until her feet hit the ground, “you cannot mount me like a strumpet in front of my family, no matter what trade it is you really do.”

“I will mount and ride you through their gardens if I feel like it,” she hissed back, and then saw from the corner of her eye that they were being  cutty-eyed by a pair of respectable-looking people exiting the house to recieve them. 

She hadn’t meant the threat as deeply as her fury made it seem, but after the appreciable fear flickered across his face for one brief moment, she found herself in the image of his long black locks haltered tightly in her fists. 

Lord Ren stared down into her eyes with an intensity that was not entirely wrathful, and she briefly wondered what he was imagining in that silent moment.

Should she slap him again; or should he slap her this time? One of them was in great need of waking up.

They blinked at each other as a welcoming procession came forth from the door of the manor. She hadn’t imagined the Solo family exiting from their fine lodgings to greet a son returning home, at least her lack of qualifications was not being closely examined in a drawing room forthwith. 

They were imposing: but not nearly as Rey had pictured. She had pictured a warm but insipid mother bouncing along the stones like a lark. And the father. The father, by Ren’s nature, cold and brittle, drifting across the earth like a spectre. 

Lord Ren seemed the type who was haunted by a father. 

Instead, the warm one was the man with gray hair, tall, like his son, and smiling crookedly with a different tone of the same smugness as his son. Smug was his smile, and in turn slightly wicked was that of the small and elegant woman on his arm. Her hair seemed natural in its slate hue, both of his parents unwigged like Ren himself chose to be, but elaborately done with braids and twists to crown her head. 

They seemed like they had good hearts, to Rey, which gave her all the more reason to entirely loathe Lord Ren.

Regardless, they needed to like her, and the honest wish in her heart for them to do truly, without artifice, made her shake down to her bones.

Cleverly, she used her fear. Rey snuggled herself into Kylo Ren’s offered arm, as though meek and shy positioned behind him. She saw the queer look they were receiving melt into one of soft affection and kindness. 

Perhaps everything could be chalked up to nerves for the summer. Could she not sing in tune? Nerves. Was she useless at needlepoint? Nerves. If she should never be able to stand to be in the same room as Kylo Ren?

_ Plain common sense.  _

And nerves. 

 

* * *

 

He put so much preparation to her that he hadn’t once thought of himself. 

She was the offering: perfectly styled for their approval. Her warmth, her aura of regality, the French lace that dressed her pretty figure. 

But himself?

He had not thought ahead in the slightest of the eyes that would be turned on him this summer: with her as a shield by way of distraction.

But his parents scarcely glanced at her as the four of them met at the middle of the walk. Rey on his arm, shrinking at the sight of Leia off of his fathers and standing very much on her own. He felt her grip waver on his elbow, then strengthen, and for a moment he was light-headed to think of her clinging to him. 

He wasn’t as flattered as he might have been because the look on his mother’s face would wither the mightiest oak. 

“Where have you been?”

He ran a hand into his un-wigged hair. 

Before he had the chance to answer, his father was racked with an awful cough. Everything in the quiet front garde went completely still. 

Rey’s hand tightened again on his arm.

His father’s was much grayer than it once was. Ironically it was not his mothers interlude to interrogation that silenced him, but the obvious age that had graced his own father after all this time. He has spent years moving away from them, defying them, destroying the expectations of their name. But this was the first time he has imagined that they had been changed as well, as people, and that tore the world away from under his feet. 

“I’m sorry,” Han said, once the fit ceased. He spoke with a richness and sincerity that clearly endeared him already to Rey, to whom he was apologizing. 

Rey was quite, breathless, and demure: if he didn’t know better he’d think she was overtaking with genuine nerves to be meeting them. She was a better actress in the presence of others than alone with him, it would seem. 

“There’s no need,” she said with a shy smile. 

Kylo had hoped they would approve of her for this ruse: he never thought for a moment if they would like her.

“There was someone I wanted you to meet,” he said, by way of explanation, and while Leia didn’t take her eyes off of him, Han was staring intently at the fiancee on his arm.

Rey was a welcome distraction. 

“I would like to introduce my future bride to my family, it was her wish that I return for you to meet. I know you take no pride in the sight of me,” he practically threw her between himself and his parents. “May I present Miss Rey Niima.”

Leia did not falter for one moment in her withering gaze. His father, however, gently took Rey’s hand. 

And the sky opened up around them. The rain had ceased only until this moment, as if to say the plan was in action, and now Kylo was on his own.

“Let’s get you inside,” Leia said to Han, who managed a nod.

“Let’s get you inside,” his father said kindly to Rey, leading her down the bricks of the walk. 

There was an odd feeling that came over him when he noticed that Han already seemed to already take a shine to Rey, and though it sparked bitterness, he tamped it down by remembering that was the plan to begin with. He was just taken aback by surprise that this came so soon in the meeting, without any of the finer garments or lies.

Rey glanced nervously over her shoulder at Kylo. He nodded her along and let his mother take his arm. 

“We don’t know any Niima’s,” her mind moved as quickly as always.

“Italian,” Kylo coughed out awkwardly, “we met during my travels.”

“So I’m assuming she’s in need of a title, and you money?”

He coughed, not anticipating the questioning to begin quite yet. Before they were even in the house.

“Neither, mother. I am in love. She has forever altered me.”

Leia was not so common as to spit on the ground at the audacity of the lie, but Kylo still felt the desire to cloud his entire senses. 

“I don’t like this. It is not a good time for him, Ben.”

Leia’s voice was low and dangerous. 

Her actually felt his heart stutter at the sound of his name.

“Is he…?”

Her anger, so much like his but a smarter anger,  _ a loving anger, _ lifted only a moment. 

“You have seen him now. I don’t think he can suffer much more disappointment, Ben.”

He swallowed, thankful he had properly selected his false mate for this summer, as he was deeply out of his depths. 

 

* * *

 

Kylo was outraged by the utter indecency done to Rey’s French lace. Though he didn’t entirely mind the way it plastered down to the modest swell of her quite pretty little  _ apple dumpling shop. _

He could practically smell cinnamon looking at the freckles speckled there. 

The curves of which he found his eyes dipping down whenever she moved, twisting a little uncomfortably in her silken dress, like she expected her shoulders to be more free. Of course at first opportunity it tore in protest from her...lively form. She had wriggled and writhed in the carriage seat across from him in a way, if her face had been a shade less irritable, he would have assumed had been to tempt more of his coin to cross her palm. Perhaps it was the style of dress of a proper lady her form rebelled against: something more  _ bohemian _ would clothe a courtesan of her stature.  _ Freeing.  _

As they watched the trunks being taken from the carriage, he took a moment to breathe. Hopefully the summer would supply enough of those. 

Rey was occupied as well, her eyes lighting at the hills and trees surrounding them. 

Marveling at the simple joy of fallen rain. 

“It’s lightened up,” she tilted her head up with a smile that stopped his heart, as though his relief brought more joy than something that inspired her own happiness. “The rain. At least it should stop soon.”

There was a gentleness to her in her happiness, it was not a sun, but a lit candle in a dark room. While the earth was accustomed to darkness, a room was unnavigable without light. 

How easily she could straddle two emotions without snapping herself under the strain of two opposite internal pulls. 

Even soothing him with reassurance of its eventual end, she trailed her fingers through the downpour, feeling it prickle against her skin. That delight was clear in her strangely innocent face.

She looked far more innocent than she had any right to be. Why did he have to wear the blackness of his soul and yet she had the smile of a spring lamb?

He plucked at the pucker of torn fabric at her shoulder. She bowed her head, abashed, and he hid his own shame but felt it more deeply at whatever he had just stifled out of her in that moment.

“I’d like you to wear the red dress tonight,” he said, instead of commenting on that smile: the single most obvious thing in the world of note at that moment.

She nodded, not meekly, but as though caught being more vulnerable than she ever intended, and withdrew her hand.

“I’d best get changed,” she tore her firm gaze from his, covering the rip with the palm of her hand. He felt the deprivation of her simple pleasure the moment she left the edge of the terrace. 

He swallowed while she withdrew herself into the house.

A fat drop carried on the wind slapped against his nose, under his brow, sliding with any icy shock down his cheek and over his lip. He blinked into the spray of rain, the storm darkening as soon as her presence was lifted from the air.

When she was gone, he dipped his gloved hand in the open air and considered the fresh rain. Then his head, cooling his flushed cheeks, shuddering as the droplets coated his skin.

He somberly wiped the same rain that touched her skin away from his with the back of his gloved hand.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BULLY. Pimp
> 
> BEAU-NASTY. Finely dressed but dirty
> 
> UNRIGGED. Undressed, or stripped. Unrig the drab; strip the wench
> 
> RIBBIN. Money. The ribbin runs thick; i.e. there is plenty of money 
> 
> GAME PULLET. a young whore
> 
> TO CUTTY-EYE. To look out of the corners of one’s eyes, to leer, to look askance
> 
> TO TUP. To have carnal knowledge of a woman
> 
> DUGS. A woman’s breasts
> 
> CHICKEN-BREASTED. Said of a woman with scarce any breast
> 
> PLUCK TO THE BACKBONE. To be brave
> 
> WEEPING CROSS. To come home by weeping cross; to repent
> 
> SERAGLIO. A bawdy-house; the name of that part of the Great Turk’s palace where the women are kept
> 
> WOMAN OF ALL WORK. Sometimes applied to a female servant, who refuses none of her master’s commands
> 
> APPLE-DUMPLING SHOP. A woman's bosom


	3. the butcher's dog

**_The Butcher’s Dog:_ ** To be like a butcher’s dog, i.e. lie by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men.

 

 

Strategically, she could tell his intentions perhaps better than he knew, Kylo insisted Rey be placed across from himself at the table. 

“I am besotted,” he declared with a sweeping gesture leaving no room for argument, which was a laugh to Rey that love was an end to an argument. It made more sense to more tender hearts: love made people act silly, and he seemed to be fine with the silliness of the ruse, should it provide them an advantage of looking like fools who couldn’t dream up such a scheme, “I can’t take my eyes off of her. I’ll take no other seat than the one where I face her head on: my beauty, my lamb.”

“I see your air for the dramatic has not left you,” Leia sniffed, but waved Rey in guidance to take the closest seat upon entering the room in a way befitting a hostess all while Kylo waded around the dining table to place himself straight across from her, himself a rude guest. 

Rey didn’t know much about propriety, but storming back to the house and making demands about seating arrangements may prove one’s love of one woman, but not much in the light of his own reformation. There might have been more of an argument to be had, but behind Rey’s newly taken chair, Han stumbled as if on frightfully weak legs, and the poise of the evening Rey already felt she was failing to meet cracked. 

Such perfection was as easily shattered as porcelain. 

Kylo’s father nearly to his knee, crumbling as though dissolving into nothing but sand, Leia was at his side with a stern look of fear on her face. The older man clearly did not like to be fussed over: it was a discordant start to the evening. Even Kylo himself was uncharacteristically quiet as the master of the house was helped up to his feet like a child learning to walk.

_ “Are you alright?” _ she murmured, a hand flying over her mouth when she realized the roughness of her accent slipping out. 

Kylo seemed equally startled by that than the fall, but no one else noticed her slip in the wake of Han’s.

It was not delicacy, but her own tender heart, that had her so unmoored by the man tripping. But she assumed a proper lady’s reaction required her to feign delicacy in these situations. 

This had done her no favors, however, and she should have known from her time in the ring that no man wanted fussing when he was already down. It doubled the pain of the wound to one of pride as well. Han may not have taken a punch in this dining room, but the hit was acute as they all spiraled dizzily around him, waiting for him to prove he was down for the count completely. 

Especially with the matter of inheritance...certainly breached, from the look Leia was giving Ben to not even dare to scent the blood in the water and all he stood to gain.

Leia and a servant aided her husband back to his feet.

“I’m right as rain,” Han waved a hand at all of them, completely red-faced and bothered by all the fuss. “Strong as an ox, and hungry as one was well. I’m sure Leia planned a meal fit to welcome a bride to the family, and a lost son home…”

He continued to ramble, his eyes on the ceiling instead of gracing any of their faces, reaching as some of them were for his gaze, as his only sign of embarrassment. 

Kylo was the only one deliberately not looking: as it seemed his father wanted at the moment. But the others were too concerned. 

Rey felt her stomach churning: as hungry as she always was, she felt sick to her stomach for her plans against such a frail old man. In her heart she had hoped he would be as unpleasant as his son. She did not think she would feel such pity for a family that had so much money. And yet, her heart was pounding as she waited in her seat.

Nervously, she looked back to the one person who held her fate in his hands: he seemed unconvinced that they should feel terrible. She could tell from the way his eyes were razor-sharp on her face. In the distraction, his hands floated above his neatly-placed cutlery. She glanced down at her own and saw as many tools as in a surgeon’s leather bag lining several layers of plates. In London, she ate greasy pies that ran oily down her hands, licking the mess off of herself when she was done, never needing to end a walk through the street to have her supper. 

This was  _ artistry.  _ Shining silver and flashing blades from a world she was not born into. A kind she was not trained for.

The silver cleared her conscience. How many pounds of it were just surrounding her plate? How much would it take to feed herself forever from the wares on the table set for merely four? Which one was for  _ soup? _

Her eyebrows shot up and she stared up at her false fiancé with a look of obvious dread. But he had clearly meant to call attention to the challenge that awaited her, and while everyone was distracted with his father he delicately touched his fingers the outermost utensils of the arrangement with the wide berth of his rather large hand. 

She hoisted her brows up a fraction higher. He nodded and held up his pointer finger. 

_ Those first. _

So that would be the reason for taking the seat where they could look at each other.

Kylo’s eyes were warmer on hers as his parents took their time getting Captain Solo seated. Their first course was laid down. She picked up the proper instruments.

She was surprised how his slight, approving smile made her straighten in her chair. She couldn’t get him to share in her joy over a few raindrops on her palm, but she would not apologize for her simple pleasures. But if this, the simplest of cleverness, pleased him, she would be no better in denying her happiness from it as well. 

Over the course of the meals though, misuse was the least of her problems with the cutlery.

The conversation dragged between parent and son. Names fluttered out, often offered to her to inquire if she knew any of the local families who were particularly well-traveled. She demurred, allowing Kylo to answer for her, and with little commitment to any given answer. She might know a great many people. 

Rey kept her eyes on her fish knife as Ren spoke for her. 

It was exquisite. Each furl and flower in the silver hilt of the knife was so  _ charged. _ She didn’t saw through her meat like a heathen, even without silent instruction under Kylo’s watchful eye. Instead, she handled the knife with a knowing balance, like it was a fine weapon. It glided in her grip. Her hands were refined from fighting, after all. The knife was a lovely thing. It felt good, this weight in her palm. 

Too good.

She could not resist. 

With a flick of her wrist, the silver knife was up her sleeve. It was as neat and elegant an act of stealing as a virtuoso strumming a harp. A laugh was smothered by a cough when she imagined being instructed to display her talents and she demonstrated the skill for the entire family to applaud around their parlor.

She wasn’t a common  rum diver. Not usually. She hardly ever stole off the streets these days, as things on the streets left to take were essentials: fighting had put food in her stomach well enough she didn’t need to sneak from apple carts anymore with a slight of hand. She wasn't proud of that skill, but it was one for survival when she was too small and too unfortunate to live any other way.

Wares such as these weren’t able to nicked off a cobblestone corner. This was a new thieving, because she’d never been near such fine silver in her life. It was automatic that her instinct was to not let it go. 

The family could take the loss. 

 She kept careful eyes on the master and mistress of the house: but they weren’t occupied with what was potentially being smuggled out of their dining room. Rey wilted a bit, so used to not being trusted for her  draggletailed appearance, that their unassuming trust of her made the success of her thievery a bitter one.

“What are you smiling about?”

The owners of the knife were unaware: but their son was not. He stared her dead on across the dining room table.

Rey smiled wider, tilting her head. 

“Don’t make me tell.”

It spilled like a treacly syrup from her lips, full of shyness and pride, and he blinked at her in the wake of her first convincing display of young love. She sold it so well that he seemed to forget for a moment what he had seen.

“Don’t embarrass your betrothed at the table,” Leia spoke nearly into her wine glass, “I won’t be able to stomach it.”

Kylo’s shock waned, and he stared knowingly at Rey.

She blinked at him, dumb and big-eyed, exactly like the  ewe he wanted for this deception. 

Kylo’s nostrils flared: furious she challenged him so openly, even under their noses.

Then, a slow smile crept across his lips, stupid, besotted, violent in love and not temper.

“I can think of just the joke that summoned it, so intimately are our minds intertwined,” he replied gently, his tone careful.  _ Oh, he’d caught her. He’d really seen all. _ She had just destroyed the fabric of this entire ruse, his thief-whore-bride, but she noticed him stiffening in his seat at the realization. 

This going poorly would further isolate him from his parents’ affections. It was too late. He couldn’t expose her for what she was without having to admit fault on his own. They’d  _ met _ her now. He had to commit to the thief as much as the courtesan: as though she was as virtuous as the Madonna. The match still had to seem well made or he’d be a liar or at best too foolish to be trusted to inherit.

And he sealed their deal with his eyes locked intently on hers:

_  “Her thoughts are precisely my own, without needing to speak them aloud.” _

The metal of the knife under her red sleeve was glistening with cold guilt against her skin.

 

* * *

 

The ship was as much of an eyesore as it had been the first time Lord Ren had laid an objective eye on it with an ounce of his own acquired sense of taste. Bulky, decrepit: a complete piece of junk. 

As a boy he had loved it, as it seemed to sail mightily across the library floor through the shelves, loved to listen to his father spin tales of his adventures while imaging the thing fighting a stormy sea: but Kylo Ren had cultivated an eye that saw it for what it was, and that was a piece of junk that always seemed to be throttling through the room even when resting still on a table at its center.

Yet the courtesan Rey circled the wooden model ship with a breathless awe, like it was a fine piece of art and not a means to transport cargo, an ugly business. The truth of it was his mother’s family and his father’s business had come together so Falconridge could be their home: supported with a name and a fortune separately. Having the last name of a merchant had stung so deeply that when the opportunity arose to take the name of a more titled relation Kylo had not hesitated. 

And lost his claim to anything befitting a Solo in the process. 

Rey was still enamored with it. She was even crouched over like a beggar woman to bring her face as close to the bow as possible, her eyes shining excitedly as she examined the details of the tiny sails.

The model of his father’s ship was always an ostentatious display in the family library, but never had it attracted such an enthusiastic audience as it did now. 

At least this excitement pleased one member of his family: Rey had been an unimpressive display at dinner, at least by way of table manners. There was a poorly suppressed  wolf in the stomach that practically howled over the beef placed on her plate. He knew the carriage had not allowed for them to eat more than a small breakfast of bread and cheese; but must she act like she was never fed at all?

So he allowed her to circle the ship, hoping to curry favor with his father’s pride and joy, as she massaged her hands grubbily over her stays as they compressed her full stomach. 

“Where would you go?”

“Everywhere,” Han smiled kindly at Rey. 

Kylo wanted this scheme to work. He needed it to work. But when it worked so well, and Han liked her already so plainly, a baser instinct to crack apart this happiness began to bleed out before he could stop up the wound:

“I have never known rougher waters than that sailed by The Falcon,” he sneered, pulling up to his supposed-betrothed’s elbow, “funny how it can take the calmest sea and toss about its cargo like a child’s toy, even when fair weather was predicted for each voyage. My father would come home with wild stories to tell me it was too dangerous to bring me along. Next time, he’d promise, next time. I have never sailed on this ship.”

“I had meant when you were old enough…”

At the rate that promise was offered: Kylo Ren would not sail on the Falcon until he was ninety.

“One can always shield oneself to the promise of a future occurrence, but one can rarely take the sting out of one that has past.”

Leia cleared her throat disapprovingly.

“He was gone long, and often, and never empty-handed when he returned. Our son never lacked for presents when his father came home.”

His mother did not use his chosen name, or even his Christian one, but the slight of its absence was noted. From the way she was eying Rey, she was careful to not use names at all, for what the young bride might be hunting for. A Ren or a Solo, Leia would probably be careful to spring whichever she chose to use to see how Rey’s eyes would light up in expectation. 

Rey kept perfectly still, as though bracing for a punch thrown in the ring, and both Han and her son shuttered a low, pained breath. The room spun, Rey’s face going hot, as once again they were steered to topics that she was not family enough yet to be privy to, even falsely.

“Speaking of long journeys…”

Rey’s smile was strained. Her reaction was for the best, as much as Kylo didn’t wish to be left alone, she knew to make herself scarce when the tension crackled too strongly. 

“Of course,” Han nodded gravely, “you must be wanting rest.”

A maid was summoned to lead Rey to her room and a hot bath.

Kylo bent to catch Rey’s hands in his and kissed her cheek swiftly and chastely as if meaning to be an obedient son. 

Neither woman in the library seemed convinced, but at least Rey could pretend.

Leia only waited for a moment of her absence to strike:

“I will not remain ignorant nor silent to the fact that she is far too young for you.”

“I can’t say I agree, without pointing out that I was also too old for you, Sweetheart. And we’ve done well enough with that obstacle as you have surpassed me in cleverness by decades.”

There was an easy, often-used affection in Han’s voice as he leaned back in his chair to invite Leia to smile with him. But as the kindness offered an all but physical hand to her, all but visible was Leia’s refusal to take it. 

“No. I was also too young for you, as I am now faced with the prospect of being widowed at an early age, with my husband dying and displacing me from my own family home. Something no amount of cleverness can rescue me from.”

“Come now,” Han said, as though he had something to add, and then said nothing. He stood from his chair. “I think I will retire. The excitement of this visit tires me.” 

Of course his father would excuse himself now. When all these troubled things were right in front of him once again. 

Liea sighed and withdrew to a shelf far from the Falcon.

“My son, after you say good-night to your father, could you assist me for a moment?”

Han was free to retire early, with a happy roll to his steps like he was back on the decks of the falcon because he could and his son could not. Kylo recognized those sea-legs about his father when he returned from long trips. It was like a different man walked the halls: Rey certainly had worked him up into a good mood.

She was a disastrous choice in all regards: but a lucky one that could not have been planned better. 

Han liked her. 

His mother was already less than impressed. 

“Mother?”

“Help me reach that book.” 

For a moment his mother did have a face of genuine frustration.

“Your father’s joints aren’t what they used to be. I suppose it’ll be nice having you around again to help me like you did when he was gone at sea.”

If he flinched, he hoped his mother wouldn’t notice it. She did. She just didn’t say anything. 

It stung to have her mention so innocuous a ritual between them that he had forgotten it was common at all. It had a way of softening his oddness as he shot up like a weed as a young man. There was a kind usefulness his mother applied to the awkward change. He could reach high shelves for her.

Even now.

Kylo bit his lip and reached for the book she indicated to, on a very high shelf indeed.

“I must get my top-shelf reading done while you have decided to stay,” she considered him carefully, “though that’s a lofty goal: it’s a large shelf and I can’t imagine your visit will be very long.”

“What do you want to interrogate me about, mother?”

“When exactly do you think this fancy will pass and you will have nothing else to prove to us once again? And with no reason to keep you here, I can’t imagine you’d stay until the end. Either I must send you away to protect your father  or you will leave us: and so he will die hating one of us.”

Kylo swallowed. He had been prepared for both of those things since he was a child.

But to take the brunt of her doubt did fill him with a sense of relief.

As of now it sounded as if Leia was merely anticipating a hasty and  left-handed marriage, which was more sincere than an entirely false one. He simply didn’t have a chance, but Rey still did. 

Whatever inferiority Leia sensed: it was paled in comparison to the truth of this ruse. 

 

* * *

  
  


It certainly felt good to get out of these  rum drawers. Ribbons and lace pulled taut over her knees itched worse than an infestation of fleas. Then she was just as eager to divest the silver knife she had taken from her person, setting it aside on a table. Stripping for her bath was only matched in pleasure by the bath itself. An actual sigh, like the strum of a cherub’s lyre, sailed from her lips as she settled in the water. 

This was worth every lie that spilled from her lips. That and a full belly. A warm bed. If all failed and he threw her out tomorrow without even a penny; it would have been one night not on the street and a meal she had dearly needed. She would be no worse off. 

And she was drunk on joy, or at least food. Laughter practically spilled from her lips at the tightness of her belly, but some protective instinct had her hunch to guard it. The fighter in her knew one slug to the gut and the fine meal she’d eaten would be in a pile on the carpet in a second. This is why she always ate after a fight. 

But a fight wasn’t coming, at least not for a while. 

The bruises on her ribs from her last bout were healing nicely. Stretched out in a tub, she for the first time examined the damage closely, across the length of herself. She couldn’t strip down in a stable and look at her bruises, and a doctor was an impossibility, so if she had aches and pains the next day she kept her clothes on and said a prayer it was nothing that would keep her out the ring next time.

She was always back.

Rey always landed on her feet. She had to.

The water was cold by the time she wondered if she should now remove herself from the tub, in denial about how cold it had become over the course of an hour. Her eyes were closed, she had half a mind to sleep there until a dull sound came from across the chamber.

Something was inside of the wall of the grand room. 

Rey leapt back, her heart in her throat, as she pressed herself flat against the far wall of the tub. No money in the world could keep her in a house that was haunted. She’d sooner steal a horse and learn to ride it blindly back to London than sleep one night near a ghost. 

The thumping on the panels of the walls grew louder. She gasped when a panel of the wall broke free from a seam of the moulding. 

But it slid open as if a door, as if intended by design for the wall to be opened from the inside. 

Standing in the secret door was Kylo Ren.

His chest was bare. 

He’d come to seduce her after her terms had been very clearly outlined. Like she was a mere, term-less  fen on the street...

“Why are our rooms connected?” he wondered aloud.

“Y-you,” Rey crossed her arms over her toweled chest, “are not a man of honor!”

The knife still sat on a table in close reach. But that felt like a rook's move. And she didn’t need a knife to fight him off, not a fop like him. She had to take a moment to consider if she landed a facer on him, if he’d still pay her despite punching him. 

He stepped inside the room and tested the door. Candlelight gleamed across his wet skin. Had he just bathed as well? Refreshing himself before a fucking?

“My parents did not place you in a room adjoined to mine, they’re too wise for that, and yet this passage led me to you. I found it when I was...” he looked away from her, “when I threw a book at the wall.”

“Why?”

_ Why was he here, why were there secret doors, why wouldn’t he leave and let her get on with her cold bath? _

And most bizarre:

_ Why did he throw a book at the wall? _

He didn’t look at her as he explained:

“I got frustrated,” the answer seemed just that simple to him, “I had a talk with my mother after I wished you goodnight. She has no approval of this current... _ situation.” _

But he smiled when he saw her flinch, “You are the least culpable in her course of disappointment, I’m afraid. She’s so angry at me she hasn’t even noticed that you can’t tell any of your forks apart yet.”

Rey should not still feel scandalized when she realized his interest was architectural, not fixed on her defilement. But she still kept her arms over her breasts and wanted to shout at him to leave.

But her voice would call everyone in the house to her room: and that would ruin this entire charade if her fiancé was existing freely in the privacy of her bedchamber. She grasped for a towel with a shaking hand.

Lord Ren rolled his eyes at her.

“Come here and look,” he gestured to the secret door, “it leads to my room through a hidden corridor.”

“I will not be taken that easily to your bedroom, you  _ vile--” _

“That is not my intention,” he tilted his head back, examining the sloped ceiling of the passage, “I merely wish to prove that entering your room unannounced was _ also _ not my intention.”

She growled at him and reached for a robe. Only a towel was available to her without turning her back on him completely: and she was too used to the environment of the gutter to lower her guard to a man like him. Tightening it with a knot that could strangle a man, she took a moment to settle into feeling slightly more clothed. She was covered, at least by her outer layer. The breeze of nakedness underneath was another story: he would be unaware of the state of her body, but she was intricately knowledgeable of how naked she really was.

And he was as well. In just breeches. 

“Don’t you have something you can put on?” She wheedled, but he ignored her. 

She was supposed to be a whore, after all, this shouldn’t bother who she pretended to be. 

At least in regards to having a stronger stomach for it. 

Rey crept across the floor, because while the likelihood of a ghost in the house had vanished, the fear had yet to rest. She peered around his large chest into the dark corridor. At the end of it, a glow of warm light. 

“Your chambers?”

“Yes,” he peeked behind her curiously, as if he had forgotten where he came from. They both examined the corridor in silence. 

Rey combed her wet hair out of her face with the hand not clinging to her towel.

“Curious,” she murmured. To give him credit, if this had been an effort to seduce her, some stealth would be more of his fashion. Not banging the door open and talking about architecture, “That you know so little of the property you are set to inherit.”

He sighed from behind her, perusing the walls as if unintentionally proving her point of his ignorance, as if seeing the room for the first time himself.

“Not so set yet, my lambkin.”

His sigh carried him down to the plush down of her bed, one cover folded back by a chambermaid, so he shrugged up against her bare sheets. Rey blinked at his bare skin relaxing over the mattress, praying he did not further  untruss himself. 

“Can I help you with something that ails you?” 

Her tone was all but accommodating.

“There is one thing you can do for me,” he tilted his head on her pillow; not unlike a cat cuddling into a warm place to sleep. 

She wandered the room so his gaze was interrupted by bedposts like trees in the forest that afternoon.

“I have never seen a woman naked. And from the looks of you: I might like it.”

He said it like he very much expected to be accommodated. Such a confession should leave him ashamed and sputtering: and yet it was Rey who was so ruby-faced he could have lit a candle by running the wick slowly along her skin.

_ “You said you weren’t a maid, sir--” _

He stared at the ceiling, his tone one of forced lightness.

“One does not require nudity for  _ fucking, _ you strumpet. You should know that more than most.  It can very well be done without It’s a rarity to get a  dasher as bare as Eve. They’re too busy. And you have clearly just bathed, it whet my curiosity. And the evening is bound to grow frightfully dull if we don’t find some amusement.” 

Of course. Fuddy  Corinthian. Kylo Ren had dipped his prick to scrawl in a  public ledger enough times to have his own narrative canon throughout Covent Garden. 

He could as easily sniff out  _ easy virtue _ as he could virtue that was true.

He turned his eyes slyly to her red face. 

“But if nakedness is expected in your parlor, perhaps when our sport here is over I shall frequent it.”

Rey crossed her arms over her chest. Only then did she remember she had to keep her limbs willowy to hide their strength. Fine ladies did not have arms chorded with muscle like hers, and whores didn’t either.

“It is not a bed you could afford, Kylo Ren.”

A shiver clutched her chest as she stood firm. 

This was more complicated than she could have imagined. A virgin playing a whore playing a virgin. A gilded lily also wearing the sweet perfume of a different flower.

False, false,  _ false.  _

“Name your price.”

His tone was soaked in curiosity, not demand, but still in irritation of being denied. Maybe she could name her price. It sounded like he’d pay it. 

_ Fine dinners and warm baths and nice soft beds... _

“You think the task you have procured me for involves  _ all _ of me, sir?”

He looked down at his chest.

“You object to the trade you offered yourself?”

“I am hired by you as an actress and companion, sir,” she held the towel to her dairy with the modesty of a nun, “the act of money exchanged does not give you the entirety of a person, no matter what skills they possess. Wealthy men seem to assume everyone is for sale for whatever they need bought: but you would hardly employ a butcher to manicure the gardens of Falconridge just for how cleverly he cuts a filet of beef, nor do my illusions this summer mean they should be conjured to feign a desire for you. A whore is a profession as good as any other, and her service is not an entitlement. It is my compliance you are buying, not my body, Sir.”

Kylo Ren surprised her. He kicked his feet out, as if getting more comfortable, lounging in her bed with a slow smile creeping across his face. It warmed his face like the sun slowly filling the air with light. It lacked all the irony of his previous smiles. She had not anticipated he would be  _ pleased _ by her answer. 

Rey had half a mind to retrieve her new knife.

“What is it? Don’t laugh at me.”

“I am not laughing,” his smile remained, “I am merely enjoying my visit with you immensely.”

“I would enjoy it more if you got your filthy  hocks off of my bed.”

“I would enjoy it more if you were naked,” he grumbled, and sat up obligingly.

They stared at each other, lost in a moment of profound awkwardness. Years of city grime had finally been washed away from her bath, more than her anxious scrubbing had managed that morning. Her skin glowed with a loveliness of care that she had never seen before. When she removed her second dress of the day, the red one, she found smudges of dirt in creases of her skin she had not managed to properly scrub away in time before her journey. She felt more naked than she had before she stepped into the bath, even undressed, and clean. A clean that living profound filth made one aware of. 

He too, looked fresh and young, his black curls tucked neatly behind his ears. 

“I am naked,” she reminded him, and herself, clinging to the wet towel draped across her body, “and you are nearly so. You have shown me…”

She felt dazed for a moment and licked her lips. 

“You have given me much to think about.”

Kylo looked at her very softly as he sat on her bed, as if he was waiting for her to claim him.

“I think it is good for us to be able to meet privately.”

She huffed in annoyance at him. He was a damned  satyr. Trouncing around looking for a lark. 

“Not as lovers,” he amended, not lifting his eyes from her and not losing that sensitive crawl towards her, “but to go over our plans. I think today went as well as it could have. I thought scrutiny towards you would spare me the attention, but it’s my examination that has spared you, for the time being.”

“You will not enter unless you know you are welcome here,” she told him with no lack of firmness. But it did soothe her, to hear from him, and have him confide in her, on the state of their plot. “But yes. It is good to...just talk.”

He stood from her bed and breezed past her in his typical bored way. 

“I know that now,” he glanced over his shoulder as he slipped into the darkened doorway of the secret passage, “especially since I am keenly aware that you have a knife, lambkin. By all means keep it, if it brings you comfort. Good night.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What will it take for Kylo to see Rey naked? 
> 
> Glossary of Terms:
> 
> RUM DIVER. A dextrous pickpocket. 
> 
> EWE. A white ewe; a beautiful woman. An old ewe, dressed lamb fashion; an old woman, dressed like a young girl.
> 
> DRAGGLETAIL or DAGGLETAIL. One whose garments are bespattered with dag or dew: generally applied to the female sex, to signify a slattern.
> 
> WOLF IN THE STOMACH. A monstrous or canine appetite
> 
> LEFT-HANDED WIFE. A concubine; an allusion to an ancient German custom, according to which, when a man married his concubine, or a woman greatly his inferior, he gave her his left hand.
> 
> RUM DRAWERS. Silk, or other fine stockings. 
> 
> FEN. A bawd, or common prostitute.
> 
> UNTRUSS. To untruss a point; to let down one’s breeches in order to ease one’s self. 
> 
> DASHER. showy harlot
> 
> CORINTHIANS. Frequenters of brothels. Also an impudent, brazen-faced fellow, perhaps from the Corinthian brass.
> 
> PUBLIC LEDGER. A whore
> 
> HOCKS. vulgar appellation for the feet. You have left the marks of your dirty hocks on my clean stairs; a frequent complaint from a mop squeezer to a footman.
> 
> SATYR. A libidinous fellow: those imaginary things are by poets reported to be extremely salacious.


End file.
